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Gasland’s Fracking Nonsense

I'm noticing a huge surge of fracking related topics all over the internet, is there something new or does it just have to do with Gasland being released?
 
Issues surrounding gas wells are nothing new particularly in areas where sour gas is involved.
Fracking just adds to the issues.

PESTS sour on fracking, want inquiry

Environmental group is concerned about the potential dangers of the gas released in northern B.C

BY BEN PARFITT, VANCOUVER SUN MARCH 9, 2011


Early last year, an army of workers at a remote natural gas operation in northern British Columbia set a world record for hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," a procedure that is rapidly becoming the norm in the global gas industry.

They pumped nearly 400 Olympic swimming pools worth of water along with 500,000 kilograms of sand underground to fracture deeply buried shale rock, thereby releasing its trapped gas.

As fracking becomes more common, people living in natural gas-rich northeast B.C. are increasingly alarmed over the associated public health and safety risks.

The pressure at which water, sand and undisclosed chemicals is pumped below-ground is so intense that it triggers tiny earthquakes. In using such brute force, unforeseen and unwelcome problems can -and do -surface elsewhere, problems that may include dangerous releases of gas containing hydrogen sulphide, also known as sour gas.

Long before fracking arrived on the scene, the health threats posed by chronic exposure to sour gas with low levels of hydrogen sulphide were well known and ran the gamut from irritated eyes to miscarriages. But it was the uncontrolled releases of gas containing 300 parts per million or more of hydrogen sulphide that filled people living in B.C.'s Peace River region with dread. Such releases killed or seriously injured industry workers; caused deaths, birth defects or miscarriages in cattle; forced people to abandon their homes by dead of night; and led at least one school district to station buses outside an elementary school in case sour gas escaped from a nearby well site, forcing an emergency evacuation.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/health/PESTS+sour+fracking+want+inquiry/4407727/story.html#ixzz1M92Jd3Ch
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Quebec has also banned it

B.C. should follow Quebec's lead on fracking
Mar 13, 2011

On Tuesday, Quebec banned hydraulic fracturing, a method used to extract unconventional gas that is also known as "fracking.” British Columbia’s new Premier-designate, Christy Clark, has extolled the virtues of natural gas as part of BC’s clean energy future and wants to increase exports of oil and gas. Given the frightening experiences of Americans and Albertans who have first hand experience with fracking, British Columbia should seriously consider following Quebec’s lead, rather than forging ahead full tilt with gas exploitation.

Residents in parts of the United States and Alberta, where fracking occurs on a commercial scale, have horrifying reports of the impacts to their fresh water sources: drinking water is trucked in by oil and gas companies, residents can light their tap water on fire, cattle and fish are killed when fracturing fluid is spilled into streams.
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http://www.wildsight.ca/news/bc-should-follow-quebecs-lead-fracking
 
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excaza said:
I'm noticing a huge surge of fracking related topics all over the internet, is there something new or does it just have to do with Gasland being released?
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Just flavour of the moment I think. The techniques are not new, though continuously being improved. Enhanced recovery from shale has been an up and coming technology for two decades. I suspect the changes are more political than technical- plus after Macondo, the press are paying more attention to onshore drilling. It's easier to drive up to a rig and take photos than to steal a seat on a helicopter.
 
Soapy Sam said:
Just flavour of the moment I think...
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Yeah, pretty much like the bandwagonning we saw years ago when global warming was said to be the cause of everything from your granny's arthritis to housing prices.

Opinions count more for science when that happens, just as is happening now with the anti-nuclear bandwagonning post-Fukushima. Japan and Germany are abandoning nuclear power, Italy has a one-year moratorium on deciding and the UK have not decided not to expand beyond current capability.

Just as the Macondo and Fukushima incidents are not evidence for the increasing dangers of deepwater drilling or nuclear power plants, neither are emotional headlines and opinion pieces in the media evidence for fraccing making hydrocarbon production more dangerous.

It is the SURFACE spills and treatment/containment incidents that are causing practically all of the environmental and pollution problems, not the the actual fraccing process itself despite what is being bandied about in the mass media.
 
excaza said:
I'm noticing a huge surge of fracking related topics all over the internet, is there something new or does it just have to do with Gasland being released?
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I'm zombifying this thread, because the recent earthquakes in Oklahoma (my home state) have brought fracking to the fore again as the cause of these earthquakes, and this same surge mentioned by Excaza is building, or redoubling, again.

Tell me about this, please. I've got family there in OK, and a couple of them are starting to listen to the talk...but I have no information to give them.
 
slingblade said:
I'm zombifying this thread, because the recent earthquakes in Oklahoma (my home state) have brought fracking to the fore again as the cause of these earthquakes, and this same surge mentioned by Excaza is building, or redoubling, again.

Tell me about this, please. I've got family there in OK, and a couple of them are starting to listen to the talk...but I have no information to give them.
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First off - I'm not a geologist, but a quick scan of USGS info indicates that OK is a very seismically active state, so earthquakes are just not that uncommon there.

As one paper by the Oklahoma Geological Survey I read on an attempt to associate fraccing with earthquakes earlier this year states, "

Anthropogenic triggered seismicity has regained scientific and media attention recently.​

​
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And that's pretty much it. In summary this report declared - unsubstatiated.

Now, if you were to read all the BLOGS on the subject, even those that link to the above paper, they will ALL declare positive, definitive, correlation/causation between fraccing and earthquakes in OK.​

.... and at the moment, I think that that is all that is in this story - blogs with agenda misinforming the public by being rather free and easy with the facts.​

Until we see more data and analysis that suggests otherwise, my opinion would be to lean toward media overreaction due to the high visibility of the subject of fraccing, rather than good science pointing to a direct causation.​
 
Just to add my own (admittedly non-expert) opinion to the fracking=quakes things:

I consider the issue as a matter of energy. The energy released in even a moderate earthquake is substantial..far in excess of the energy involved in the fracking process. So fracking can't be the "source" cause of the earthquake...it simply doesn't put enough energy into the ground. From the USGS in regartds to nuclear detonation and quakes (not exactly the smae thing, but gives an idea of the energies involved):
The elastic strains induced in the epicentral region by the passage of the seismic wavefield generated by the largest of the nuclear tests, the May 11 Indian test with an estimated yield of 40 kilotons, is about 100 times smaller than the strains induced by the Earth's semi-diurnal (12 hour) tides that are produced by the gravitational fields of the Moon and the Sun. If small nuclear tests could trigger an earthquake at a distance of 1000 km, equivalent-sized earthquakes, which occur globally at a rate of several per day, would also be expected to trigger earthquakes. No such triggering has been observed. Thus there is no evidence of a causal connection between the nuclear testing and the large earthquake in Afghanistan and it is pure coincidence that they occurred near in time and location.
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So, the next question is...could fracking be a "trigger"? Perhaps it "lubricates" pre-existing fault lines so they slip more easily, resulting in quakes. For the sake of argument, let's assume this is true. That means it wil cause more, but smaller earthquakes. With this idea, then a fault line that was locked together, and would only break free and slip when the strain got up to the equivalent of, say, a 6.0 earthquake, is now going to release that pressure in 10 4.0 earthquales (just pulling numnbers here, but you get the idea). Think about snapping your fingers: you get more of a pop with dry fingers than wet; and it's easier to snap fingers than wet paper mache :)

There may well be a third possibility I haven't consdiered, and I'm sure the reality is much more complicated than I've presented, but until someone can give me a good idea on how fracking would cause earthquales...and that these are more dangerous than "unfracked" earthquales, I relegate this to urban myth.
 
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Debaser said:
A fracking company called Cuadrilla has accepted that a combination of unusual geology and their activities has caused tremors in the UK.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-15550458

Although they've now introduced measures to allow better detection and earlier warning (as a result).
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Note that the maximum reading was 2.3 on the Richter scale, a "micro" tremour that is, "Not felt except by a very few under especially favorable conditions.", according the the USGS.

Hardly earth-shattering news..:boggled:.

But of course it was caused by gas fraccing, so the world's about to end...
 
Could it be that the bedding-plane opening in the shale, induced by the fracking process which would not act in a uniform fashion which probably have allowed some de-laminated rock layers/fragments to shear on fractures or joint-sets and was lodged under the soffit of such an open fracced bedding plane , increased the stress in the overlying strata resulting in a downward force which eventually crushed said rock acting as "props" when the waterpressure was reduced, which resulted in the 2.3 event ?

Similair magnitude events occur from both the drilling&blasting activities and rock-falls from tunnel roofs in the TauTona mine at depths of almost 4km below natural ground level in South Africa on a very regular basis. These evens are hardly noticible, have been going on for more than 50 years and have not caused any damage neither above ground or in the overlying rock structure.
 
Libra said:
Could it be that the bedding-plane opening in the shale, induced by the fracking process which would not act in a uniform fashion which probably have allowed some de-laminated rock layers/fragments to shear on fractures or joint-sets and was lodged under the soffit of such an open fracced bedding plane , increased the stress in the overlying strata resulting in a downward force which eventually crushed said rock acting as "props" when the waterpressure was reduced, which resulted in the 2.3 event ?

Similair magnitude events occur from both the drilling&blasting activities and rock-falls from tunnel roofs in the TauTona mine at depths of almost 4km below natural ground level in South Africa on a very regular basis. These evens are hardly noticible, have been going on for more than 50 years and have not caused any damage neither above ground or in the overlying rock structure.
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Caudrilla have published a 71 page report on the causes and mitigation of seismic events due to there operations.

See "Geomechanical Study of Bowland Shale Seismicity" at http://www.cuadrillaresources.com/

Short answer? Fault slippage.
 
AlBell said:
Update:

http://townhall.com/columnists/marybethhicks/2012/02/15/frack_nation_digs_up_the_notsoscary_truth
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While I hesitate to comment on a documentary before it is even broadcast, I hope that the producers of this don't just stick to debunking flaming taps and dwell on how the "little people" on the land are being conned out of income from a moratorium on fraccing, but fully and honestly investigate all the issues with the current trend in gas production.

There are problems with it - but contamination from the wellbore is not the main issue (if an issue at all). The main problem with the method is treatment of produced water and fraccing fluids. This is where most of the environmental contamination risk lies.
 
fracking Cheney

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=safety-first-fracking-second

Scientific advisory panels at the Department of Energy and the EPA have enumerated ways the industry could improve and have called for modest steps, such as establishing maximum contaminant levels allowed in water for all the chemicals used in fracking. Unfortunately, these recommendations do not address the biggest loophole of all. In 2005 Congress—at the behest of then Vice President Dick Cheney, a former CEO of gas driller Halliburton—exempted fracking from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Congress needs to close this so-called Halliburton loophole, as a bill co-sponsored by New York State Representative Maurice Hinchey would do. The FRAC Act would also mandate public disclosure of all chemicals used in fracking across the nation.
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